13th
Let's Celebrate 5 Months "Without Inside the Glass"
It’s all finally over and only one week shy of the summer solstice. God bless playoff hockey! Pittsburgh took the Cup last night with a tightly fought 2-1 victory in Detroit to be only the third team to win the series in a game 7 on the road. It was a series FULL of story lines, almost too many to keep track of, for example Dan Bylsma had shirts made for his team with the masturbatory encouragement “The Pen’s In Your Hands” to wear beneath their uniform. The most memorable, though, will probably go down as the Marian Hossa saga who ended being on the wrong end of the hand shake line in back to back years but, less famously, Ty Conklin seems to be the one who’s REALLY snake-bit. NHL Fanhouse has a great article today recapping his “luck”.
After spending several days looking forward to the ultimate showdown I nearly had to turn it off before it started thanks to NBC’s schlocky pre-game “speeches” from Mike Milbury and Paul Schaeffer to their respective “teams” (read: empty locker rooms). Milbury gave me chills when he appealed to the Wings to turn in one more night of hard work for all the Detroit residents who don’t have any work to go to, and not in a good way. More in a WTF kind of pandering is this? Dudes there’s a reason neither of you are coaches in the NHL and if you need an explanation just watch this performance on your DVR. Herb Brooks you ain’t.
Last night’s game started out fast and furious despite some tentative play on both sides. The Penguins ended up with a slight edge offensive at the end of the first but the best scoring chance of the period went to Cleary and the Wings.
There was a lot of talk after game 5’s drubbing about how the Pens were still immature and didn’t know how to do what it would take to win the series. After watching games 6 and 7 you really have to hand it to them as they really changed their entire style of play from top to bottom. Everyone from Sykora to Scuderi to Crosby and Malkin were willing to make the sacrifices and play the kind of grinding, unglamorous game to pull it out, precisely the type of game the Caps did not play. The 2nd period which has typically been the bane of the Pens playoff existence became the bright spot for them. Max don’t call me -ine Talbot recovered a perfect rebound off a Malkin forecheck that is exactly the type of play I was talking about and slipped it home to give the Pens a 1-0 lead early in the period. The Pens blocked a lot of shots throughout the period and after Crosby got sent to the locker room early by a questionable hit by Mikael Samuelsson to his vagina they killed off a Wings power play which had briefly come alive only a few games ago. A 2 on 1 just after the halfway point of the period found Max Talbot on the left wing with the puck on his stick and supreme confidence as he wristed a shot up where mom hides the cookies for his 8th goal of the playoffs only 4 shy of his goal total for the entire season. To be honest I thought Osgood looked like he wasn’t far enough out of the net to cut the angle and I can’t tell if it was shaken confidence or if he was cheating the pass across to the other winger. In any even the Joe seemed a little stunned that someone not name Malkin or Crosby could be putting them away. Detroit kept their pressure up though but in an almost desperate frenzy. They seemed to be looking to get pucks on the net from anywhere even though there was still nearly 30 minutes of the game remaining. They also, uncharacteristically, taking off-sides calls—another sign of loss of composure.
The Wings snuck one through from the point with just over 6 minutes left in the third and clamped down on the Pens even harder but a cross bar by Kronwall with 3 minutes left and some stellar saves by the Flower down the stretch, including a magnificent one on Lidstrom just before the buzzer, dispelled any memory of the troubles he seemed to have in Detroit.
Comissioner and public enemy number one Gary Bettman was roundly booed as he presented the Conn Smyth trophy for MVP to Evegeni Malkin. Malkin ended up with 36 points in the playoffs, the most since Gretzky scored 40 in 93, and elevated his physical and defensive play in the Finals. A deserving award and the first time the Art Ross winner for most points has won the Smyth since Mario Lemieux in 1992. The crowd then proceeded to treat the comissioner like a war criminal as he presented the cup to the youngest captain in history to win it Sidney Crosby.
